With the improvement of the computing power of mobile device, many applications are moving to mobile environments. This trend towards mobile environments has led to the proliferation of a number of different interaction techniques, i.e., human mobile computer interaction or HMCI. Regardless of the ever going set of applications, email remains the most used mobile applications (based on statistics of mobile email adoption in enterprise mobile application from Sybase Survey, 2008).
Due to constraints such as display size, mobile applications are typically directed at a single function, e.g., emailing, blogging, tweeting, etc. Thus, there is a lack of simultaneous multi-application update capability for the mobile environment, i.e., only a single application can occur at a given time within a screen and a separate app is required for each function. It has been found that switching between various small-screen applications may lead to poor performance on PDA class devices, e.g., smart phones.
The limited display sizes in mobile devices in combination with pervasive use of mobile email decreases the likelihood of adoption of other applications each capable of a plurality of functions. Moreover, switching applications in a mobile environment also means that a user can switch to only one other application at a time as the displays are too small to include more than one application within the display at one time. Thus, if a user wants to simultaneously interact with several apps or devices at once they must switch between discreet applications and then access them one at a time.